I was trapped in the pages of Silvina’s journal, which had opened up and become an ocean of paper flooded with black water. It sucked me in and down until I came to the bottom and drifted there with all the dead animals. I saw their eyes now, or what had replaced their eyes. These glass stares, so false, and yet somehow real, too. I couldn’t breathe, but I didn’t need to breathe. I had gills or it just didn’t matter anymore. The monkeys and the crossbills and the wallabies and the lizards and the box turtles and the frogs, so many frogs glowing iridescent way down there beneath the surface, in the bog. I could see an indistinct shape above and reeds radiating out and the faintest hint of moonlight.

I gasped and took on water. I waved my arms to swim and embraced the animals around me until their eyes were alive and quick with thought again. I did not care that they were rotting, that I was rotting. That we were all down below in some purgatory worse yet better than the warehouse. Had I brought them here? Had I led them here?

“Total Nature,” Humboldt had written. Which meant no separation. No looking away. No way out but down.

I realized I was beneath Unitopia, looking up. That I was drowning underneath Silvina’s creation, as surely as if Ronnie had put me there. Because she had.

[66]

I woke with a headache that kept trying to smash my skull in half. Staring up at ripped-apart foxes on a dim-lit mantel.

Silvina’s old apartment.

I tried to move, but couldn’t.

The man who had followed me up the hill flickered and drifted into view, and my axes aligned and I was right-side up again. Bound to a chair—an old plastic lawn chair brought in from the balcony. My hands had been lashed to its arms with police-grade plastic restraints. I had to keep shifting my weight because the frame wasn’t going to stop my ass from smashing through the seat soon.

Two men stood behind “Hill Man.” I didn’t recognize them.

But I panicked at the way they were looking down at me and I thrashed, lunged, fell over in the chair, tore the seat, twisted an arm, my shoulder against the floor. A strangely numb shoulder. Throbbing. I’d been drugged.

Dust swirled up and I saw, close, drag marks on the floor I hadn’t noticed before.

Still the men said nothing, just watched me.

I stopped struggling. The restraints wouldn’t come off. The chair had collapsed around me in a way that felt like I’d trapped myself worse.

Something bounced off the side of my head, skidded past me toward the mantel. The fox kit’s head. Staring back at me. Hillman had thrown it.